The Cretans had a system of writing as long ago as 2500 B.C. The
language therein embodied is still a mystery to us, in spite of Sir
Arthur Evans’s monumental work _Scripta Minoa_ (1909). The hope
is that Sir Arthur will find a clue to the mystery, but up to the
present the fact is that there is no starting-point for any attempt at
interpretation. If a bilingual inscription could be found--a Cretan
document, that is, side by side with a translation in some known
language such as Egyptian--a start could be made.
It was inevitable that the art of writing should be evolved early in
the history of man. Even in the most primitive stages of life there
would be the elementary necessity, for instance, of identifying one’s
own property, and for this the most likely means would be some system
of marking. Then, again, the development of communal life would
entail the duty of keeping appointments, or of doing a particular
thing at a particular time. It would, one thinks, have been too much
of a strain, even for the mind of a Stone Age man, to keep all the
details of his daily, still more of his annual, routine in his head,
and the handkerchiefs of those remote days may not have been of such a
material as to lend themselves readily to mnemonic knots. It is quite
conceivable, as an instance of the sort of necessity that would arise,
that at a given time it could be calculated how many days ahead the
provisions would last, and when, therefore, the hunter must be ready
for the hills. He might prepare a handy reminder with a pictographic
representation of some commonplace event that was to take place at the
same time, and by hanging the picture up in an obvious spot.
One’s range of activity would increase as time went on, and it might
conceivably be necessary to deliver a message to a man over on the
other side of the valley in circumstances where one could not take it
oneself. Such a contingency would produce some form of written message,
for the message might be private or unsuitable for oral transmission
by a third party. To give a concrete example from later times: Proitus
wanted to kill Bellerophon, but did not want to do it himself; he
therefore sent the doomed man to the King of Lycia “with letters of
introduction written on a folded tablet, containing much ill against
the bearer ... that he might be slain” (Homer, “Iliad,” vi. 169). Not
all people are original enough to transmit such a communication orally
by the bearer.
Fifty, even forty, years ago it was the general doctrine of Greek
scholars that the Homeric poems were never written down till long after
they were composed, perhaps even, so some thought, not until 560 B.C.
Till then, we used to be taught, they were preserved wholly by memory
and by oral transmission. But on the strength of the above passage from
Homer--the only passage in either “Iliad” or “Odyssey” where writing is
mentioned--Andrew Lang in 1883 argued that the art of writing must have
been known to the early Greeks. “It is almost incredible,” he said,
“that the quick-witted Greeks should have neglected an art which met
them everywhere in Egypt and Asia.” He argued better than he knew. Not
only was the art of writing known to the early Greeks, but it was known
to their forerunners a few thousand years earlier, forerunners whose
very existence was not suspected when Andrew Lang wrote. Curiously
there had been found no trace of writing in the Mycenæan remains,
although this fact has since been shown to be due to mere chance.
In 1893 Sir (then Mr.) Arthur Evans caused general astonishment by
communicating to the Hellenic Society his discovery of the fact that
certain seal stones which he had found in Greece, and which had been
assumed to be Peloponnesian, were, in fact, Cretan. This startling
revelation was clinched during the years that followed by the discovery
of further specimens of Cretan writing. Excavation in Crete was started
in 1900, and the first year’s work yielded up hundreds of clay tablets
inscribed with Cretan writing. Was Homer writing fairy stories when
he made Proitus send his doomed Bellerophon to Lycia with his “folded
tablet”? Or did he know that the Lycians were colonists from Crete?
A tentative sketch of the successive phases through which the art of
writing passed may be made, even if it largely depends upon unconfirmed
surmise. The temptation to fill in the gaps by what seems reasonable
conjecture is hard to resist.
Minoan writing must have started, quite naturally, with simple
pictographs, such as have, in fact, been found--simple pictures of a
man, a leg, a ship, representing a definite thing that it was desired
to indicate. They are called “ideographs” because they signify a
single idea. They next developed into “hieroglyphs,” that is, pictures
which had acquired by association a certain use among the people who
employed them, but whose original meaning has been lost, and can now
only be inferred. In the parallel case of Egyptian hieroglyphics,
guessing at such meanings has been shown to be dangerous work, for in
many cases the established interpretation is far other than what one
might have supposed.
The first pictographs were evolved in the Early Minoan period (c.
2800-2600 B.C.), and are found on seal stones. It may be fairly
assumed, therefore, that in Crete the first method of writing down
ideas was by seal impressions. By the Middle Minoan period the seal
stones are elongated, and contain a succession of designs, by which a
connected chain of ideas could be reproduced. The lines of pictures
are sometimes read from left to right, sometimes from right to left,
a feature in which, as in others, they resemble the Hittite system of
writing. In all cases the document is read in the direction in which
the figures it contains are facing. _Scripta Minoa_ (p. 203) gives
a typical example of this species: namely, a picture of a ship with
two crescent moons, of which the probable meaning was a voyage of two
months’ duration.
The next step in the evolution of writing came, no doubt, when
phonetic values were assigned to the pictures; that is, when the sound
made in pronouncing the name of a given thing or person or action
became associated with the conventional ideograph which represented
that thing or person or action. When that happened, the same ideograph
began to be used in writing out other, more complex, words in which the
same _sound_ occurred, although in _meaning_ there was no connection
with the original pictograph. To take a hypothetical example. Suppose
we were in that stage of evolution to-day. We may have formed the habit
of denoting an axe by a simple picture of that instrument; thereafter
the sign of an axe would have become a symbol for spelling the same
sound whenever it appeared in any other word. In spelling the word
“accident,” for instance, we should start with the picture of an axe.
This sort of thing seems to us mere “punning,” but it would cause no
more difficulty or hesitation to the primitive writer than it would
have, say, to Mr. Weller, senior, to whom the relation of the written
to the spoken word and of words to things was still mysterious. Once
begun, the method would be eagerly applied to fresh words.
The first attempt at “syllabics,” or the writing out of a word by
separate symbols for its separate syllables, was made more intelligible
by the use of “determinatives.” By “determinative” is meant a
pictographic representation of the idea denoted by the whole word.
These we find appended to the spelling of a word in order to give the
reader at least some inkling as to whether the word denoted mineral,
animal or vegetable. A man’s name, for instance, would be followed by a
picture of a man.
The physical strain involved in drawing pictures every time one wanted
to write down a word or two would obviously soon become intolerable.
It is not therefore to be wondered at that, by the time of the Middle
Minoan III period, the hieroglyphics have been simplified into
conventional signs which are easier to make. Herein is the germ of
what we call “linear” script, that is, of a system of writing based on
a set of regular forms, such as our own alphabet. By the Late Minoan
I period there was a full linear script in use throughout Crete, and
it was extended to Melos and Thera. Sir Arthur Evans has called this
script “Class A” to distinguish it from a parallel form of it which
was introduced in the next period (Late Minoan II), and which he
calls “Class B.” The latter is not a different script, but merely a
variation introduced, it is supposed, by a new dynasty at Knossos. Most
of the Knossian tablets that have come down to us belong to the “Palace
period,” and are written in the Class B style.
It was the usual practice to write the inscriptions with a stilus, that
is a pointed rod of metal, on a clay tablet, and this is the form of
most of the inscriptions that have been preserved. It is possible that
wooden tablets covered with a layer of wax were also used; but even if
they were, none of them, of course, could have survived the burning of
the palaces. More interesting still is the fact that pen and ink must
have been used even in those remote times. This fact is established
by the discovery of two cups (Middle Minoan III) which are inscribed
in ink. There can be little doubt, therefore, that long documents and
any literature there happened to be were written in ink on papyrus. It
is probable that we shall have to make up our minds to the complete
loss of all such literature, for Cretan soil lacks the dryness of the
Egyptian. If our worst fears prove true, we may experience the final
anti-climax of the discovery that the clay tablets, when read, will
contain nothing after all but lists and bills.
It is obvious that many of the tablets do consist of bills or
inventories. Although we cannot yet understand the language of the
script, it has been found possible, by studying the clay tablets, to
reconstruct the system of numbers that was used. We have, for instance,
what is evidently an inventory of arrows, a record surmounted by a
picture of an arrow. From this and other records it is apparent that
thousands were expressed by “diamonds,” hundreds by slanting lines,
tens by circles, units by straight lines, quarters by a small “v.” The
highest number recorded is 19,000.
Although it is true that scholars still wait a clear starting-point for
transcribing the Cretan script, there is one interesting and important
point already established by Sir Arthur Evans. He has proved to the
general satisfaction of classical scholars that the Phœnician alphabet,
which had always been supposed to be the original source of the Greek
alphabet, and therefore of the Latin alphabet from which comes our own,
was itself derived from Crete. This theory, however, is disputed by
Egyptologists.
There are in existence three fragmentary inscriptions, two of which
were found not long ago by Professor R. C. Bosanquet at Præsos, in
Crete--near to Mount Dicte, and not far to the north-east of the
boundaries of Knossos--which are written in Greek characters, and are
therefore quite legible to us, but which contain a language which is
not Greek. Is it the language of the Minoans? It is not yet possible to
say, although Professor Conway, who has examined the inscriptions at
length in the _Annual of the British School at Athens_ (vol. viii, p.
125, and vol. x, p. 115), may some day be able to give an answer.